12,000 calories a day

Published : Aug 23, 2008 00:00 IST

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Eggs, mayonnaise and assorted fats make up a jaw-dropping proportion of Michael Phelps’ diet. How can he force it all down? And what is it doing to his body? Jon Henley finds out.

Here we go then: The Michael Phelps Diet for Health, Happiness and More Olympic Gold Medals Than Anyone Else Ever. We’ll ignore, momentarily, the fact that the best swimmer the world has seen stands 1.93m tall, has a wingspan — fingertip to fingertip — of 2.00m, and weighs in at 87kg.

We’ll ignore also the fact that he spends most of his life in a pool, swimming at least 80km a week very fast indeed, and the rest of it in a gym. I am going to see what it is like to eat what Michael Phelps eats in a day. On a table are a large bowl of porridge; three doorstep-sized sandwiches of white bread, butter, fried egg, fried onion, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise; a five-egg omelette tastefully garnished with parsley; three slices of French toast liberally sprinkled with sugar; three pancakes topped with chocolate chips; and two large cups of coffee. That’s breakfast. Yummy.

Next to it is lunch, which consists of 1lb (that’s a very large bowl) of pasta with tomato sauce; two large ham-and-cheese sandwiches with more lettuce, tomato and don’t forget the mayo; plus four bottles of a proprietary high-energy sports drink that always makes me burp.

For dinner, it’s another pound of pasta, a large cheese-and-tomato pizza, and another four bottles of the same proprietary high-energy sports drink. So I kick off with the porridge, which is the nearest we could get to the large helping of grits the 23-year-old reportedly consumes. It wasn’t bad. I manage, I’d imagine, a normal-sized kind of a portion: 10 good spoonfuls. The fried egg, fried onion, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches are more of a challenge. It’s the mayo, I think; somehow, you don’t quite expect to be scarfing down mayo first thing in the morning. It’s greasy, and it smells.

I start to feel slightly queasy. But I struggle through half an egg sandwich — one-sixth of what Phelps manages — and push on to the five-egg omelette. It was nice and fluffy on the outside and satisfyingly runny in the middle. Most importantly, it did not contain mayonnaise. Half the omelette consumed, and it was time for the French toast.

There are, I begin to think, rather a lot of eggs in this meal. I feel slightly more queasy. Plus, I’m now chewing a lot. You know that feeling, when you have to chew an awful lot or you know you’ll never get it down? One mouthful at a time. Slowly. And there are still the choc-chip pancakes to come. I force down one-and-a-half of those, very slowly, with the help of both mugs of coffee.

I feel dreadful. Gross, bloated, uncomfortable, sick. I cram a serviette urgently to my mouth, breathing deeply. I pause. I make a few calls and write a bit, not very well (it shows). And hey, guess what: it’s lunchtime! I find I cannot so much as look at the mayo-plastered ham-and-cheese sandwiches without the bile rising, and manage a couple of forks of pasta before, finally, blissfully, calling it a day. Afterwards, six colleagues pile in and eat their fill for lunch, and it still doesn’t look like a dent has been made in the insane, illness-inducing mountain of food that the American swimmer ploughs through every single day of his life.

Apparently, he worries about keeping his weight up. I’d worry about not sinking. “I’m not surprised, dear,” says Professor Janice Thompson, head of Bristol University’s department of exercise, nutrition and health sciences in south-west England. “There’s no way you should be able to eat what Michael Phelps eats. This is not even a normal athlete. I would not recommend this kind of diet for even a fit and serious competitor in, say, a 10km road race. This man is in a very, very different place to the rest of us.”

I have here an example of a Phelps training programme from 2002. I don’t pretend to understand it fully, but it looks pretty awesome (“pull”, by the way, means arms only. No legs). “After a 4,500 short-course yards moderate morning practice,” it reads, “warm-up: 800 mixer on 10:30, 4x150 kick on 2:30 (50 stroke-50 free-50 stroke), 400 pull with buoy on 5:00 (breathe 3-5-7-9 by 100), 200 stroke on 3:00, 10x50 on 0:45 (2-25kick/25drill 2-25free/25stroke 1-stroke). Main set: 4x50 on 1:30, 1x50 1:20, 1x50 1:10, 1x50 1:00, 1x50: 0:50, 1x50 0:40, 1x50 0:30. Long Swim Down: 100-200-300 pull (lungbusters by quarters), 400 choice kick, 300-200-100 IM Drills.”

What that means, as far as I can work it out, is that Phelps swam 12-13km at assorted, gradually increasing speeds using a variety of strokes (or half-strokes). He then (and this is the real killer) got out of the pool and, according to the programme, did “500 abdominals, and some stretching”. Undeniably, the man expends a lot of energy. But can a diet like this one really help him? I mean that’s not what most of us would call a healthy diet, is it?

The average adult man, depending on age, height and weight, requires between 2,200 and 2,800 calories a day. According to most media estimates, Phelps’s daily intake — the three meals described above — amounts to around 12,000 calories. Anita Bean, sports nutritionist and author of Food for Fitness, finds it slightly hard to believe even Phelps can be expending quite as many calories as that. “Say he’s doing about 6-7km a session, and a couple of sessions a day,” she says, “plus his land training — I’d say he’s burning maybe 5,000 calories in training, and maybe 2,500 simply to sustain himself. Something like 8,000 a day in all? Mind you, he is a very big bloke. I haven’t looked at his schedules, but 12,000 seems a lot.”

Thompson appears less surprised. “I’ve worked with extreme athletes, triathletes for example who work phenomenally hard, who expend between 6,000 and 10,000 calories a day,” she says. “I can believe someone like Phelps is getting through 12,000. And the point is, it’s plainly working for him, isn’t it?”

Calories aside, Bean is concerned by the makeup of the swimmer’s diet. “It does look quite salty, quite fatty, not very high in good fibre or in fruit and veg, he’s certainly not getting his five a day,” she warns.

Thompson concurs. “Phelps’s primary fuel source is going to be carbohydrates,” she says, “and he’s going to be burning them at a truly phenomenal rate. There’s protein in there too, obviously, which he needs to maintain and repair muscle mass and tissue. But for someone like him, in a sport like his, it’s really a question of how many carbohydrates he can get in, as quickly as possible. So this diet might look very high in fat, but if he had to eat this same number of calories in a diet that contained, for example, more fruit and vegetables, he’d simply never manage it. His body just couldn’t hold it. His intestines would give up. He’s lucky as it is that he doesn’t have a sensitive digestive system. That’s one of the myriad factors that contribute to make him the exceptional performer he is.”

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008

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